The 10 features removed from Mountain Lion that we miss the most

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry once wrote, "perfection is finally attained not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away." To make sure perfection doesn't slip through its fingers, Apple always errs on the side of taking away a bit more than some people think is necessary. Although Mountain Lion doesn't ruthlessly excise big-ticket items the way Lion did—such as compatibility with PowerPC binaries—there are still many smaller features that have gone away. After living with Mountain Lion for a few weeks, we're really starting to miss some of these. Here are 10 of the ones we miss the most:

10. Non-smooth scrolling. Much to John Siracusa's chagrin, there's no longer an option to turn off smooth scrolling system-wide. Yes, it looks pretty, but smooth scrolling also wastes time and activates our "something is moving in the grass!" instinct. It's still possible to scroll choppily by clicking inside the scroll bar—if present. There's also the option of using option or command+option and an arrow key, as in Safari Reader (for instance). In addition, John mentions a terminal command in his Mountain Lion review to disable smooth scrolling system-wide.

9. Automatic document locking. Lion would lock documents after 14 days to avoid inadvertent changes. Apparently someone at Apple got (understandably) annoyed with that big "this document is locked" message that appears after you start typing in a document you just opened, because Mountain Lion no longer has this feature. Although the warning could be startling, having some protection against inadvertent changes wasn't always a bad thing. Fortunately, you can still manually lock files from the Finder using the Get Info option, or with a little menu that drops down from the file's name in the title bar when you hover the pointer over it (in conforming applications).

Locking a document in Pages

8. IT writer Andrew Cunningham only needs one word: iChat. Yes, iChat's functionality has been subsumed into Messages. And sending iMessages from the desktop is pretty cool. But sometimes you just want to instant message using one of the "legacy" IM services, without all the other OS X and iOS devices in the house chiming in. There is a lot to be said for keeping IM and iMessage/SMS text messaging separate—they're just not the same thing. But there's nothing to be said for having video chat over IM in Messages and video chat through Apple's FaceTime in a separate app now that both are out of beta.

7. (The GUI to) Web sharing. OS X comes with a copy of Apache, the world's most popular Web server software. I've often used the built-in Web server to share files with my colleagues without the need to set up accounts and passwords. Apache is still there, and on my system—which had Web sharing enabled before I upgraded—it's still running. But it no longer knows how to locate HTML pages and files in the Sites folder of each user. And you can no longer turn it on or off in the sharing pane of the System Preferences.

6. The Safari search box. Contributing writer Jonathan Gitlin doesn't care who knows it—he wants it back. Yes, we've all typed search queries in the URL bar or URLs in the search bar in the past. It's not that the unified bar is necessarily a bad thing, but is it really so much to ask to be able to bring back the separate search box by customizing Safari's toolbar? Especially because with search suggestions turned on (the default), your search engine of choice gets to see URLs as you type them in the unified bar. And the suggestions have top billing, above your own history and bookmarks. Then again, with search suggestions turned off, you get no search suggestions when you actually want to search. With a separate search box you can have both privacy (well, such as it is) and convenience. And there's that half a decade's worth of muscle memory, too.

5. Displays in the menu bar. In the PowerPC days, there was actually a function key dedicated to turning on and off the mirroring of a laptop's internal display on an external display. We lost that key a few years after the Intel transition, but the little display icon in the menu bar was the next best thing, allowing you to quickly turn mirroring on and off, and to switch display resolutions. In Mountain Lion, you have to fire up the System Preferences for this; the menu bar icon now only governs mirroring the display to an Apple TV.

F7 doubles as the mirroring on/off switch on a PowerBook G4.

It's understandable that Apple has made the choices for display resolutions less prominent now that the CRT days are over, as LCD displays have a single native resolution. But quick access to that display mirroring toggle can be a lifesaver when you find yourself on stage at a conference with your entire computing life projected on the big screen behind you and nothing on your laptop screen. Apple, maybe you could let us bind the display mirroring toggle to a key? Or perhaps open the display preferences through right-clicking the desktop, similar to changing the desktop background picture?

Update: it turns out that there is an undocumented keyboard shortcut to toggle mirroring: command-F1 (as long as the function keys are mapped to special functions rather than F1/F2/F3 et cetera).

4. Using a laptop with the lid open, but with just an external display active. Running with the lid open keeps a laptop a good deal cooler during number crunching, and I can't even remember the number of times I needed the built-in trackpad to enable Bluetooth so I could switch to the wireless mouse and keyboard. Yes, you can move the menu bar to the external screen and turn off the backlight on the internal screen if you want to work on just the external screen with the lid open. But this still allows the mouse pointer and windows to get lost on the other screen, and it wastes GPU capacity to draw the unused screen.

Before Lion, you could just hook up the external screen to a laptop with the lid closed, wake up the laptop, then open the lid, and the screen would remain inactive. As of Lion, the internal screen comes on when you open the lid. But there was a trick to avoid this: first sleep the display, then open the lid, then wake up the display. Unfortunately, this trick no longer works in Mountain Lion. We know that it's possible to have the lid open and the internal screen inactive. Why not give us the opportunity to use this configuration if we want to? And if possible, without jumping through weird hoops, please.

3. Battery time. No, I'm not talking about the reduced battery life that many Mountain Lion users are experiencing. In previous versions of Mac OS X, you could have the time remaining until the battery is empty (or full, when charging) displayed next to the battery icon in the menu bar. You guessed it: it's missing in Mountain Lion. Now you have to click on the battery icon to see it. Hoops. Jumping. We don't like it.

2. Creative Director Aurich Lawson misses Safari's Activity Viewer. With the Activity Viewer, you could easily see the size and location of all the HTML, scripts, and images that are part of a webpage, and whether they had loaded. No more. Viewing the HTML source of a page is now also gone from the View menu, but at least you can bring that one back as "view page source" by enabling the debug menu in Safari's preferences.

1. RSS in Safari (and Mail). I first discovered RSS through Safari. Rather than visit sites manually, I just subscribed to their RSS feeds right from the browser and was then able to peruse the aggregated feeds to see if any of them had published something worth reading. I believe almost everyone who uses RSS has long since moved on to Google Reader or a specialized RSS reading app, so it's no big deal that Apple removed RSS from Safari (and Mail), right? Wrong. Although I no longer use Safari to aggregate feeds, I still used Safari's RSS button a lot after landing on a random blog post through a link posted somewhere. That button would quickly give me the latest ten or 20 headlines to provide context to a post. Yes, blogs have archives. But I really do miss that RSS button.

Why, Apple? Why?

In many cases, it makes sense that a feature is removed. Keeping PowerPC compatibility around forever is unworkable; the only question is whether removing it with Lion was too early or not. Letting users get software like Flash, Java, and X11 directly from the company or group that maintains the software is a slight inconvenience to users, but allows for quicker turnaround on security issues and clearly separates responsibilities. Things like removing the option to automatically lock files and the disabling of smooth scrolling are probably because Apple no longer thinks they're useful, and they have a hard time imagining that someone else still might. And I'm sure there is a constant hunt for GUI elements and settings that can be removed to avoid cluttering up the system.

But some changes are just perplexing, and can seem punitive. Like the battery status: when I first noticed it, I thought, "That makes sense; they could never figure out how long it really takes to charge the battery." But the same flawed estimate is still there, along with an option to enable/disable showing a percentage. You just have to click to get it. This seems like a change for the sake of change, with no advantage for Apple or the user. Maybe it will all make sense when we read about it in Tim Cook's biography.

Still, all hope is not lost, as Apple sometimes brings back excised features in the following OS X version. A good example is the "Save As" that was removed from applications that adopt Lion's new document model, which is now back—albeit it with an unexpected side effect. So, tell us (and Apple) which abandoned feature you miss the most in the discussion thread, and maybe we'll get back one or two missing features when the next big cat arrives in a year or so. Still, it would be better if such features would be brought back from the dead in a point release. In the current system, OS X users have to perpetually live in a half-baked world, with every version of OS X missing some features that are available in both older and newer releases.

Iljitsch van Beijnum
Iljitsch is a contributing writer at Ars Technica, where he contributes articles about network protocols as well as Apple topics. He is currently finishing his Ph.D work at the telematics department at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (UC3M) in Spain. Emaililjitsch.vanbeijnum@arstechnica.com//Twitter@iljitsch

182 Reader Comments

Some poorly written applications like Divvy require X11 which is pretty annoying. Although this isn't Apple's fault, it does get rather annoying to see them care so little about backwards compatibility.

Aurich, everything we used Activity Window for has been moved into the Web Inspector. There is no loss of functionality, though the UI contains a bunch of other useful stuff for diagnosing problems as well which can be jarring for new users.

X11. Why no X11? I'm critically dependent on it for work, and the reason I switched to a Mac in the first place - from a succession of Linux laptops - was that it was a UNIX box with MS Office. No X included is an out-of-the-box experience just like being on a Windows laptop and having to install Exceed: yuck.

Does anyone have a tl;dr for the tidbits article? AFAICT the "unexpected side effect" is that there's too many options and they need to clear them out. Because if you need 3000 words to describe how it works, it's a bad UX design.

I miss two features from 10.6.8 (the last version I had). First: Expose, or specifically, the ability to use x (4) fingers and swipe down to show my programs, and swipe up to show the desktop. 4-finger pinching to show the desktop or the iPhone-like app menu is awkward, and swiping up to get at the new expose seems illogical, and is slower.

Second, I miss the simplicity of scrolling in 10.6.8. There was no silly "bouncing" at the end of a webpage or in finder. It just scrolled straight to the end, then stopped. No hassle, and no waiting for the animation to finish to click.

Edit: This is probably silly, but I also miss the support for iTunes 9.2.1 that I had back in 10.6.8. Feel free to disagree with me on this one =)

X11. Why no X11? I'm critically dependent on it for work, and the reason I switched to a Mac in the first place - from a succession of Linux laptops - was that it was a UNIX box with MS Office. No X included is an out-of-the-box experience just like being on a Windows laptop and having to install Exceed: yuck.

I don't think, technically, Save As has an unintended side effect. There is no function such as save as in ML any more. It rather just a renaming of the previous Duplicate function, plus a close of the other file (which, in the ML unser environment, means also saving the previous file in its current, ie changed status).

Does anyone have a tl;dr for the tidbits article? AFAICT the "unexpected side effect" is that there's too many options and they need to clear them out. Because if you need 3000 words to describe how it works, it's a bad UX design.

Non-smooth scrolling — some want to disable the animation when scrolling vertically or horizontally to instantly arrive to where they meant to go.Automatic document locking — OSX used to warn users when they edited auto-saved documents for the first time after a certain time (14 days).iChat — being platform agnostic for messaging is not always awesome.(The GUI to) Web sharing — web developers and such now need to use the Terminal to start and stop the web server.The Safari search box — Google will know everything, even those time the author is not searching.Displays in the menu bar — using external screens while not using the laptop's is not as nice or easy as it used to be.Using a laptop with the lid open, but with just an external display active — ibid.Battery time — we have all been fooled by thinking that the time estimate for remaining battery time is correct, some still are, which is why Apple killed it.Safari's Activity Viewer — features moved elsewhere and became more powerful. That's not good.RSS in Safari (and Mail) — is no more.

Long live the death of automatic document locking!! I can understand why some people might like it, and wouldn't have had a problem with it if I could turn it off. But I guess that same statement goes for a huge number of these features . . .

I don't think, technically, Save As has an unintended side effect. There is no function such as save as in ML any more. It rather just a renaming of the previous Duplicate function, plus a close of the other file (which, in the ML unser environment, means also saving the previous file in its current, ie changed status).

The part I emphasized is the unexpected side effect. Obviously that won't be the user intent when doing "save as". At the very least the system should ask what you want to do with the old file, which I believe Lion did when using "duplicate".

People moaning about X11 going missing should note two things: 1) XQuartz has always been better than the bundled X11, 2) The main XQuartz developer Jeremy Huddleston is an Apple employee, who got his job at Apple due to being a promenant volunteer developer on XQuartz in the early days. I take this as a sign that Apple is still supporting X11 on Macs, albeit in a more open development model.

It seems to me that Apple is focusing more on small screens to the detriment of larger ones. The main examples are things like full screen mode and Launchpad, but the menubar changes mentioned in this article are another example: removing the remaining battery life and the displays menu saves room on the cluttered menubar on the 11" MacBook Air, though on a 27" iMac this is nowhere near being a problem.

On my mid-2009 (Intel) MacBook Pro running Mountain Lion, external display mirroring can be toggled by pressing ⌘+F1 (assuming the keyboard is set to use the F-key special features by default; otherwise Fn needs to be pressed as well).

I don't know whether this has been changed on any newer hardware models, but I'm guessing it hasn't.

It seems to me that Apple is focusing more on small screens to the detriment of larger ones. The main examples are things like full screen mode and Launchpad, but the menubar changes mentioned in this article are another example: removing the remaining battery life and the displays menu saves room on the cluttered menubar on the 11" MacBook Air, though on a 27" iMac this is nowhere near being a problem.

Are you just saying things because you can? Who could give a shit either way these are such stupid little trivial things.

I'm not anti apple by any means but why does every little insignificant thing they do have to be discussed in such painful detail.

Removing the time indicator from the battery icon boggles the mind. I don't care how many percentages of battery life I have left; I care how many hours:minutes I have left. Why would Apple take that out?

I understand that this article is an opinion piece (or at least I think it is) but X11 not being in ML is a major kick to the balls for me. Mostly because the built in terminal client is a POS. Does not send mouse commands properly when using midnight commander or a number of other 'cli' programs. Using X11 allowed me to do this with no issue.

Removing the time indicator from the battery icon boggles the mind. I don't care how many percentages of battery life I have left; I care how many hours:minutes I have left. Why would Apple take that out?

Because it never actually worked in any satisfying way. It was a good idea, but we have fooled ourselves into thinking that it worked better than it actually did.

Before Lion, you could just hook up the external screen to a laptop with the lid closed, wake up the laptop, then open the lid, and the screen would remain inactive. As of Lion, the internal screen comes on when you open the lid. But there was a trick to avoid this: first sleep the display, then open the lid, then wake up the display.

That seems like a lot of effort to do something that should be trivial. This laptop I'm on right now has it shared on a function key: I can hold FN and tap F8 to cycle through various secondary display modes. Laptop only, Dupe, Extend, External only...

For something that was already figured out years ago, it seems really weird that Apple would intentionally make it a pain in the ass. Is it just an extreme case of Not Invented Here?

[EDIT: Apparently the article is updated about this being an undocumented/unlabeled feature involving certain keyboard configurations. Odd that they would leave it in and just remove all the icons and notes that refer to it, though.]

As for the file locking, shouldn't that be simple enough to do with a script and a cron job? find all files where last modified < today - 14d, lock them.

The rest of it is just Apple not giving a shit what you think about how your their computer should work.

I'm seriously thinking about downgrading from Lion to Snow Leopard right now. Apple seems determined to screw up OS X as much as possible at this point. Everything they add/change now is either crap, or downright regressive.

It seems to me that Apple is focusing more on small screens to the detriment of larger ones. The main examples are things like full screen mode and Launchpad, but the menubar changes mentioned in this article are another example: removing the remaining battery life and the displays menu saves room on the cluttered menubar on the 11" MacBook Air, though on a 27" iMac this is nowhere near being a problem.

Are you just saying things because you can? Who could give a shit either way these are such stupid little trivial things.

I'm not anti apple by any means but why does every little insignificant thing they do have to be discussed in such painful detail.

Nice, I love getting constructive criticism. (I hope you appreciate the irony in your comment about saying things just because you can.)

Seriously though, I was discussing the possible reasoning behind two of the ten things discussed in this article - that's what the Comments section is for. That's why I wrote something that you plainly find inane and pointless, what's your excuse?

As for the file locking, shouldn't that be simple enough to do with a script and a cron job? find all files where last modified < today - 14d, lock them.

That's a pretty convoluted way to do it, app level support is much better since it will not waste battery time or unnecessary computation time because then it only needs to check the modification status for one of a few files when requested by the user.

I understand that this article is an opinion piece (or at least I think it is) but X11 not being in ML is a major kick to the balls for me.

Relax, X11 hasn't gone anywhere. It's just no longer bundled with ML.

From http://xquartz.macosforge.org"The XQuartz project is an open-source effort to develop a version of the X.Org X Window System that runs on OS X. Together with supporting libraries and applications, it forms the X11.app that Apple has shipped with OS X since version 10.5."

I was very upset the days as F7 died, but after a long search, I found this solution. I'm going so far always pressing CMD+F1-Key, F2-Key right after another to get another display mode and a monitor check. This repairs most problems I have in in presentations.

(Note: I'm speaking of the "special" keys, not the "real" F1 or F2 keys, but these are the keymodes which are assigned anyway per default, so it is an easy shortcut.)

Another hint: ALT + volume keys (F10/F11) will bring you the shortest way into the menu which toggles Airplay Audio on/off.

On my mid-2009 (Intel) MacBook Pro running Mountain Lion, external display mirroring can be toggled by pressing ⌘+F1 (assuming the keyboard is set to use the F-key special features by default; otherwise Fn needs to be pressed as well).

Good find! Too bad it's not documented anywhere. I updated the article.